Wedding Babylon Read online

  About the Book

  Why are weddings so expensive? What makes us spend a year’s wages on one Big Day? And just how Big does your Day actually have to be? Does getting married on a shoestring make it any less romantic than Daddy dropping a cool £7m and hiring Beyonce?

  What are the big no-nos? Do bridesmaids’ dresses always have to be so hideous? Why do brides cry? When does Mumzilla turn up? And does the best man’s speech really need to be so awful?

  Packed with scandal, stories and intrigue, Wedding Babylon lifts the lid on the excesses of an industry where emotions run high, money flows like champagne and £3,000 cakes are made of polystyrene. Following a week in the life of a busy wedding planner, and based entirely on true but anonymous stories, Imogen Edwards-Jones takes you behind the scenes on what is supposed to be the happiest day of anyone’s life.

  Hilarious, shocking and thoroughly entertaining, here is definitive proof that, sadly the course of true love never did run entirely smooth...

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Sunday a.m.

  Sunday p.m.

  Monday a.m.

  Monday p.m.

  Tuesday a.m.

  Tuesday p.m.

  Wednesday a.m.

  Wednesday p.m.

  Thursday a.m.

  Thursday p.m.

  Friday a.m.

  Friday p.m.

  Saturday a.m.

  Saturday p.m.

  About the Author

  Also by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  Copyright

  Wedding Babylon

  Imogen Edwards-Jones & Anonymous

  For Eugenie.

  Please can I be a bridesmaid?

  Acknowledgements

  With very grateful thanks to the extremely talented, highly entertaining and delightfully naughty players whom I met within the wedding industry. I am wholly indebted to them for their humour, generosity, trust, patience, endless explanation, great anecdotes and, most of all, their time. I would very much like to thank my dear friend Anonymous, whom I have literally travelled to the end of the earth with, for his help, humour and advice with this project. I couldn’t have done it without him. Thank you also to the handsome Doug Young, the fabulous Laura Sherlock, the dashing Larry Finlay and all at Transworld for their fabulousness. Nothing would get done, written or indeed published without you. Thank you all.

  Prologue

  All of the following is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the situations, the highs, the lows, the excesses and the insanity are as told to me by Anonymous – a collection of some of the finest and most successful planners and players within the wedding business. However, for legal reasons, the weddings are fictionalized although the incidents are real and the celebrities play themselves. Narrated by Anonymous, the stories now all take place in a week in the life of a wedding planner. But everything else is as it should be. The brides take centre stage, the mothers try and steal the limelight, and the grooms are bit-part players in a show where everyone else takes their cut. It’s just another week in the turbulent and stressful world of weddings.

  Sunday a.m.

  IT’S THE BIRDS that disturb me first. Their endless bloody twittering has been going on ever since I crawled into bed this morning. And now the sun’s pissing me off too. No matter how hard I try to move my head, the glare still manages to bore right to the back of my addled brain. There’s no point in trying to sleep. The fact that I don’t have the option is, of course, neither here nor there. In a couple of hours I’ve got to be back on duty, all tits, teeth and Listerine, reminding everyone how fabulous they were yesterday. In the meantime I might try just lying here for another five minutes enjoying these crisp linen sheets.

  I close my eyes, but am suddenly enveloped in a blancmange of sheets and pillows and cushions. I am quite literally drowning in comfort. What is it with these posh hotels that they feel the need to cover the beds with so many goddamn soft furnishings? A mop of expensive blonde highlights appears from under the bedding, rapidly followed by an acrid yawn of old champagne.

  ‘Morning,’ she mumbles through her pink-stained lips, rubbing black mascara circles around her eyes. ‘D’you have any Nurofen?’

  ‘No, sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ she coughs, hacking away at the contents of a whole packet of Silk Cut Ultra stuck in her throat. ‘Call yourself a wedding planner?’ she sniffs, before flopping back into the pillows.

  I didn’t mean to fuck the bridesmaid. I was forced to. It was a toss up between her and the matron of honour, and somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to do it with Matron. A friend of mine did that once and it got him thrown out of school. But given the choice between tracking down a minicab at four in the morning and heading cross-country to seek out a two-star B&B with a dragon manning the door, or tiptoeing upstairs with Louise or Abigail, it was no contest. And she was keen. Very keen. It takes a certain type of girl to carry off the missionary position while wearing a baby-pink frilled taffeta dress, and Louise/Abigail did it with great style and gusto. She even broke the bedside lampshade in the process. However, as I sense her hands making their way rapidly towards me underneath the duvet with all the rootling enthusiasm of a bargain hunter at a jumble sale, I think it is time to make my excuses.

  ‘So,’ I say, leaping out of bed, butt naked. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asks, propping herself up provocatively on the pillows and cocking a bare leg over the top of the duvet.

  She has one of those figures you only ever seem to find in the Home Counties – narrow hips, long, slim legs with fine ankles, and the sort of enormous bosom that begins under the chin and ends at the waist. It’s a combination that can prove mightily distracting when poured into pink taffeta and paraded down the aisle, as half the blokes at St Mary’s Church, Walton on Thames yesterday will attest.

  ‘I’ve got the brunch to organize and the clearing up to supervise. I’m working,’ I say, searching through the debris at the bottom of the bed for my underwear.

  ‘It’s eight a.m.,’ she sighs, eyeing up my backside. ‘No one will be up for hours.’

  ‘Shit!’ I say. ‘I am already late.’

  I leg it down the corridor, avoiding the collection of untouched breakfast trays and crisp Sunday Times newspapers, and head straight down the main stairs of the hotel, buttoning up my shirt as I go. Squinting into the sunlight, I stride across the lawn pretending to exude efficiency, only to find a sturdy group of Gallowglass boys already hard at work.

  Hewn from young, muscle-bound, usually Antipodean stock, the boys from Gallowglass earn about a tenner an hour crewing heavy stuff in and out of weddings, gigs and private parties – anywhere that can afford to pay for an extra pair of hands. Employed for their breezy nature and big muscles, they are cheap and charming, and I couldn’t get through a wedding without them.

  At last night’s reception for 180 people we tried to create some sort of louche bar effect for the guests to retire to after the dinner. We set up a false wall between the dance-floor/bar and the dining room, only for the wall to drop away after the cake-cutting ceremony to reveal a relaxing area packed with sixties and seventies furniture: velvet sofas, glass tables and large free-standing lamps, as well as the couple of wicker swing chairs that I can see two strong-armed blokes are in the process of dismantling.

  ‘Morning!’ I nod towards them, pretending that I have been around for at least an hour and am firmly on top of things. ‘Careful with that!’

  The more bleached blond of the pair smiles through his go
atee. ‘Keep yer hair on, mate,’ he says. ‘It’s lighter than a Bangkok lap-dancer.’

  ‘And he’d know,’ sniggers his mate.

  ‘Good, excellent, keep up the good work,’ I reply brusquely, heading towards the marquee.

  In the cold light of morning, the tent doesn’t look quite so glamorous and decadent as it did last night. The yellow silk lining looks a little jaundiced, what’s left of the flower displays hang limp and dehydrated, half the lemon-coloured roses have been pinched, along with the tea lights, and there are hundreds of fag butts squashed into the hand-laid parquet floor. Slim Jim glasses full of half-quaffed cocktails clutter the tables and champagne flutes full of ash lie in all corners of the marquee. What is it with posh people? I rented thirty-five ashtrays and still no one seems to have been able to find one when they were pissed at two in the morning. There are a few tailcoat jackets left on the backs of chairs, I spot a rejected telephone number scrawled in eyeliner on the back of a menu card curled up under a table and a damp-looking lilac silk handbag lying next to where the ice bar was. Five grand’s worth of fun, the slippery blocks were hauled outside by the poor caterers at just after three o’clock this morning in the hope that they would melt quietly around the back.

  Walking through the marquee towards the back entrance into the garden, I kick over a high-heeled shoe. Bending down to reunite it with its other expensive-looking half, I notice a pair of black lace knickers underneath one of the tables. I was clearly not the only person to get lucky last night.

  ‘You’re late!’ comes the startling bark of a familiar voice.

  ‘Shit,’ I say, hitting my head on the table. Crawling out, I quickly scrunch up the lace knickers in my hand. Too late.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re collecting trophies this early in the morning,’ says Bernard, shaking his head piteously.

  ‘I am not,’ I protest. ‘I’m tidying.’

  ‘Stop!’ he declares, raising a manicured hand like he has heard it all before – which he has. ‘Go and make sure there’s enough drink for the brunch. Lord knows where the bloody caterers are.’

  Bernard is very well preserved for a single man just the wrong side of fifty. Tall and slim, he exudes all the well-washed, powdered and puffed cleanliness of a homosexual with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Which he is and has. His shirts are handmade, his shoes are polished daily and his suits are the crème de la crème that Savile Row can produce. His golden cufflinks are monogrammed and his watch whispers a quiet elegance. He is very definitely old school. He has buckets of charm, a tongue as sharp as a Tungsten steel razor, and he can spot a misplaced fork at forty paces. His gimlet eyes are often so narrowed that you could mistake them for a couple of silverfish slithering across a sideboard. His worst vanity – and he has many – is his hair, which despite the constant oiling and combing and tweaking, he insists on dyeing himself. As a result it can shine a gentle plum purple in some – well, actually most – lights.

  But he is one of the best in the business. He has been a wedding and party planner for twenty years and in that time he has matched most of the great and not so good in the country. He started back in the days when the most extravagant nuptials were tea, cakes and a flute at Claridge’s and everyone was tucked up in bed by ten thirty. Now there isn’t a lion-tamer, elephant-handler, pyrotechnic practitioner, sky-writer, ice-sculptor, martini man, bagpiper or flower-petal-wreath-maker whose details he doesn’t have in his well-thumbed Rolodex in South Kensington.

  There are only four of us at Penrose, in a first-floor office just off the Brompton Road. Bernard is in charge, obviously, and I am his number two. Camilla is our well-connected, somewhat dyslexic secretary, who can book a three-storey marquee almost as enthusiastically as her weekly manicure. The other is Jez, Bernard’s slouching, twentysomething nephew with bouffed X Factor hair. He spends his days surfing the net, while furiously texting long-legged lovelies who look like they are channelling Peaches Geldoff, and has little or no interest in the wedding industry. Which is a shame, really, as last year the company had a turnover of more than £21.5 million and a profit of just under £2 million.

  I can feel Bernard’s eyes boring into the small of my back as I head back inside the hotel to check on the booze. All the bottles left over from last night were collected together and locked into a storeroom near the kitchens at the back of the hotel. You have to be so careful with alcohol in the hospitality industry because it is one of the easiest things for light-fingered staff to lift. It is normally counted in and counted out of the party by either Bernard or me, and locked up in a safe place overnight for use the next day. The host is usually informed as to what has been left over and where it is being put, so there is no accusatory confusion the following day. If the quantity in the cupboard doesn’t tally with what the host is expecting, then at least neither the caterer nor anyone from Penrose is going to get the blame. Suspicion usually falls on the marquee team or the band, who are notorious for their ability to sniff out alcohol like meths-fuelled tramps, no matter how carefully it has been stashed away.

  Hotel staff are just as bad, though. I should know. I used to be one. Thieving was one of the perks we looked forward to when I was a deputy manager at a provincial luxury hotel and spa near Chipping Norton. The reasoning behind it was, we were working a full-on weekend to a capacity crowd of demanding, short-tempered London types, and the least we deserved was a complimentary bottle of champagne courtesy of the bride and groom. Thankfully, nearly two years ago, Bernard took me away from all that. He was impressed by my people skills (mainly female, apparently) and told me he needed a new right-hand man as his last sidekick was moving on to The Admirable Crichton, or Bentleys, Fait Accompli, Lillingstons, Party Planners, or another of his equally high-profile competitors. I didn’t need asking twice.

  So now I’m the one keeping an eye on the staff, making sure any leftover bottles of champagne make it through the night. Just the other day I managed to prevent the bar staff at a five-star hotel just off Hyde Park from ‘clearing the bar’. I remember this swift move from the not-so-old days, when as the guests move through after their champagne and canapés, the staff very efficiently tidy everything away – quite literally, everything. You turn your back for five seconds and the last six bottles of Krug have magically disappeared. The staff, of course, very conscientiously offer to let you count the empties out the back. But as any booze thief worth his free bottle of Bollinger knows, you just bring in a few bottles from the day before to make up the numbers.

  This morning, however, the stash appears to be untouched. There are a few cases of Veuve Clicquot still unopened and a couple of cases of wine. I remember at the first wedding that I did with Bernard I couldn’t quite believe the amount of drink he ordered. While Camilla phoned the list through to Majestic, where we have an account, he explained that on a hot June afternoon you need to allow for between a bottle and a bottle and a half of champagne per person.

  ‘What? Including Granny?’ I said at the time.

  ‘Especially for Granny,’ he insisted.

  He went on to explain that straight out of church, after a long service, the first glass of cold champagne barely touches the sides. It is chugged back in one and you need to refill immediately. The second glass is knocked back with almost as much speed as the first, and from then on, the guests don’t care. Any waiter with a bottle will be asked for a refill. So that’s a bottle before dinner. And the other half is for the toasts, cake and speeches. He added that a bottle of red and a bottle of white are about enough to get them through dinner, plus a litre of water per person to make sure they can stand up at the end.

  ‘It’s a long hot day,’ he said. ‘You don’t want anyone to go thirsty.’

  The booze order and quantity also differ from nationality to nationality. The Brits are all about wine and champagne, although there are a few weddings these days where we end up doing a full bar, and during these less affluent times, cocktails are making a huge comeback. More mixers an
d less alcohol means your cost per head decreases quite significantly. On the whole, the young Russians and their oligarch parents that Bernard appears to be particularly popular with want vodka. And lots of it. A bottle each, according to Penrose calculations. The Gulf guys want whisky and, as they are not supposed to drink, they get half a bottle each. Their wives are usually on the fizzy drinks or water. And the same goes for the huge Indian weddings, where we cater for half a bottle of gin each for the blokes to add to the same amount of whisky.

  ‘I trust all is ship-shape?’ says a nasal clipped voice. I don’t need to turn around to know that it is Nigel. Extravagantly tall and exceedingly slim, Nigel has thinning baby-blond hair, a long nose and nostrils so flared that in strong sunlight you can almost see right up to his brain. His catering company, The Lilac Olive, is a well-oiled fine-dining machine that can produce a three-course culinary treat in a car park, ploughed field or any other equally inauspicious venue. Lilac, as it is known in the trade, is Bernard’s first choice when it comes to weddings and, indeed, bar mitzvahs.

  ‘It seems to have survived the night,’ I say.

  ‘Mmmm – which is more than I can say for you,’ says Nigel, inhaling through his huge nostrils. ‘You smell cheaper than a rent boy in King’s Cross.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, sniffing my own armpit. ‘It’s not too bad,’ I lie. It is all I can do to stop my eyes from watering. No shirt or indeed deodorant could survive a fifteen-hour shift at the sweaty coalface of the hospitality industry.

  ‘Take it from me, you stink,’ he says, taking one polished step backwards. ‘Didn’t you manage to shower this morning? Were they all out of water at the B&B?’

  I can tell he is fishing. His pale-blue eyes are fixed on me, darting back and forth, searching my face for signs of an interesting story or a grubby anecdote that he can pass on. For Nigel, despite all his long vowels and clipped consonants, is as bad as any elbow-over-the-garden-gate gossip. In fact, he is worse. His catering company flits, week on week, from wedding planner to wedding planner, and with him and his pinky-in-a-blanket canapés comes the gossip. You may as well film yourself at it and put your bare arse on YouTube as let Nigel know, because if he gets to hear about something it is round the industry in minutes.